S H Raza: Odes to love and longing from the 'bindu' artist
NEW DELHI: "You made me aware of a feeling that seemed foreign to me, that belonged to others, that I despised. That beautiful feeling of joy, which perhaps could also be mine."
No, that's not a romantic author or a poet expressing his deepest thoughts, but the late artist Syed Haider Raza in one of his letters to Janine Mongillat in 1953.
Raza, who died on this day last year at the age of 94, went on to marry the French contemporary artist six years later and lived on in Paris for over half a century.
The letters from the artist, who created works of art with his brush and his words, are scheduled to be published as a book later this year.
The letters of love and longing, now in the custody of the Raza Foundation and made available to PTI, are a far cry from the 'bindu', 'purushprakriti' and 'nari' concepts in geometric abstract works that propelled him to iconic status.
"You made me aware of, in all its plenitude, a feeling that I do not know how to describe, and which nevertheless shows itself in all my letters without my speaking about it.
"You have also made me aware of the exquisite sweetness of some moments, which I have often neglected or destroyed.
How to write what they have become to me, I, who is consumed by the days and nights as they came, happy or unhappy, without knowing well the existence of this void," he wrote in one letter.
Raza was born in 1922 in Mandala district of Madhya Pradesh to a forest ranger father. He took up drawing at the early age of 12 and enrolled at the J J School of Art in Mumbai (1943-47), before moving to Paris to study in 1950 on a French government scholarship.
It was in the famed European city of love that he met Janine, a fellow artist.
What followed was an affair to remember.
After Raza's return to India, the two exchanged as many as 80 letters between 1952-1956 before tying the knot in 1959.
"Raza indulged in poetic passionate exaggeration in romantic hyperbole, all truly deep and genuine. He brings the same kind of passion and fury to his love as he did to his art," said Ashok Vajpeyi, close friend and managing trustee of the Raza Foundation.
The correspondence with his wife also reveals the artist's emotions and struggles in his early days in France.
"I am immersed in my dreams. Dreams incessant, sad-if I think, gay-if I abandon myself to the intensity of my pure feelings. I do not search any more, I hope to find. Will there be a new order to my life? I do not know. Consequences-i no longer think of them. MANDLA (MP): An ancient tree, a dilapidated school building and its sepia tinted admission record circa 1931, are perhaps the only tactile remnants of Syed Haider Raza's early childhood that was spent in the thinly populated village of Kakaiya here. While the staff of Shaskiya Madhyamik Shala hasn't forgotten the iconic modernist painter, the visible sense of dejection on their faces is hard to miss.
As Mandla remembers Raza on his first death anniversary, the government school, where he studied for less than a year in 4th standard, now lies in shambles.
Pointing at the locked door of a defunct classroom, school incharge Narendra Kumar Patel recalls his meeting with the 'bindu' artist in 1986.
Raza was visiting for the first time since he left school.
"It was February 6, 1986 and I was teaching on this verandah when a man in a suit lay down flat on ground at the school's entrance. Then, he got up and picked some sand and rubbed it on his forehead.
"I was, of course, confused and asked him who he was, and he said, 'Sir ji, consider me a mad man for a few minutes.
Then, I will explain everything.' He just sat here quietly looking at the walls and the entire school," Patel said.
It was only later when Raza nostalgically told him about his schooldays, and how he had become a renowned name in the world of art, that Patel and others realised they had a celebrity of sorts among them.
It was perhaps the nature of his forest ranger father's job that Raza and his elder brother Yusuf only managed to attend classes intermittently till December of that year.
The primary section, where Raza was admitted was closed down five years ago, and a makeshift kitchen to prepare mid-day meals is all that is there.
Presently the classes take place in a new building.